So my KW/h rate has gone from 0.0817 to 0.1315 in the last two years. I went from paying $219 a month for electric to $450+ and I could no longer justify this and needed to take action - this is what I have done.
- For storage I had 3-R710’s with 6-4tb drives each, I moved to a new to me QNAP with 6 brand new 20tb WD Red drives and moved all of the data to that and unplugged the R710’s.
- I moved ESXi and Guests from an r630 to a new to me Dell Precision 3650.
- I moved PFSense from an R410 to a new to me Protectli Vault micro appliance.
- I retired the Cisco Catalyst 3560-X in favor of a new to me low power HPE 48p selectable POE switch.
- I put my backup host (Dell Optiplex with a 4th gen i5) running Veeam on a smart switch. I have a script that shuts the computer down after the backups complete and then an hour later the smart switch powers off. The smart switch powers on the computer and I have the bios set to power on the computer after a power outage. This happens three times a week.
- I set a group policy to set the Windows power plan to balanced from high performance for my computer and my GFs computer. This has dropped both of our computers from using 150w+ to 20-30w at idle. Identical computers 11900k/3080ti EVGA FTW3
- My torrent host is another Dell Optiplex with a 10th gen i5, I have that set to Windows power saver mode and max 45% CPU / min 0%, it uses less than 1w at idle now.
- I recently install a whole home energy monitor into my main panel and integrated it into HomeAssistant so I can log and monitor. (see imgur picture)
- On top of all of this I have set my water heater from 145F to 135F, unplugged unused devices in unused rooms too.
I am happy to say my mini production environment is now running stronger and cooler, the ambient air temp in the basement has dropped from 86F to 70F. The best part of this is I just got my latest energy bill. I went from $510 last month to $270 this month! Nothing else has changed other than what I have posted here today.
Check out this screenshot of the energy monitor, with both gaming desktops, both fans, and all the basement lights and TV/AV receiver powered right now, I am only using 600ish watts! Before that I was using over 2.5kw/h
https://imgur.com/a/uqblvyw
Serious question.
Why didn’t you bring the hot water heater down to 120?
Usually the mixing valve is required to be at 120 or below, so keeping the tank hotter won’t be noticed
Not OP, but the hotter the tank the more effective capacity you get after mixing it. So if you want to run long showers/baths, higher temp makes sense. And as long as the tank is well insulated, the higher temp shouldnt make a huge difference long term, my water tank reaches temp and then turns off until its next used, its not frequently reheating.
I cant believe paying that much money for electric bill. I use a laptop with broken screen and keyboard for Proxmox even tho I have a poweredge r210ii. Power consumption is around 7 watts with one usb external drive to the laptop. Only have 2 VMs on proxmox.
Nice work.
Jealous of your 0.1315 😂
What’s that HPE switch model?
I’m running a Cisco 2960X atm and an Aruba 2930F JL258A currently.
I also have 2 Cisco WS-C3560CX-8PC-S and 3 C1000-8FP-2G-S switches I can swap things out for.
Waiting for “winter” to get here in the south so I can run some ethernet cable through the attic to a few places and finally mount my network rack on the wall.
I’m confused. How much was your idle draw before in total?
Can you give more info on your energy monitor device? How does that work and what is it called?
shelly em is probably the most used
If you’re in the US it’s not that common.
Nice work! Studies have shown many times that visibility into ones energy usage is the most helpful tool in reducing energy usage. You can’t adjust effectively if you have to wait a month to see the results, being able to monitor energy live lets you make realtime tweaks to see what works.
My homelab has been running at about 90W for a long time, but had gotten up to 150W after adding an HPE ML30 and a new switch. I’m now about to retire one host (should have an Optiplex 3060 Micro for sale soon…), combining two POE switches, and hoping to get back down to at least 100W.
This should be a pinned post for Homelab for others who are looking to pickup Enterprise servers for home use.
People do not realize the power consumption, cooling requirements and the noise levels enterprise servers take to run.
And this is exactly what keeps me from doing that. RN I’m running a mix of raspberry pis and a beefed up desktop pc, planning the next version, which will most probably be a series of orange pis in a cluster.
I don’t have a usecase for virtualization though, I’m running a shitload of containers.
Nah, OP just has ancient garbage.
Those 10th gen servers are over 10 years old.
No, everyone needs a Colo datacenter’s worth of hardware in their moist basement
Too true. I haven’t turned on my R720 in over a year because of all that.
But I will say that anyone that actually wants to play with the PowerEdge stuff should look at the R2X0. I have an R230 that idles at around 40W with a couple simple VMs running. Nice way to still get the iDRAC/enterprise experience while staying relatively low power.
I would also add that people add multiple enterprise servers/computers for virtualization when they only need a single device. Make that single server sweat lol.
How can I save on electricity?
That’s impressive.
I’m crying in .35p/kwh ($0.43)
Damn I feel spoiled I pay 12.4384¢ per kWh where I live.
Edit: Actually I just check apparently it went up to 14.69¢ per kWh 😂
It’s crazy how cheap power is some places. Paying upwards of $0.42 USD a Kwh here in Southern California.
and a big part of the reason is taxes and regulations. People with $$ don’t care, but everyone in the bottom 75% really takes a big hit compared to their income.
Cries in PG&E Time of Use pricing at $0.32 (winter low) to $0.54 (summer high) per KWh
One of the best things I did for my homelab is swap from 2 120w Xeon servers to a single Intel 12400 machine. Went from $4-5 of power a day to $1-$1.50.
As in an i5-12400? Which xeons did you retire? I am smacking myself as I’m one of the newbs that went with an r630 lmao but probably could have gotten away with something smaller, newer, and more powerful. Though I do like the drive space and pcis
Don’t turn off the smart switch! Power cycle when you want the machine to boot. Killing all power will drain your CMOS battery faster because there is no standby power. Last thing you want is finding out your backups failed or drives got corrupted because it was no longer booting to the OS and getting a hard shutdown repeatedly.
Do you have a source for that claim? I power off my desktop contantly and have done so for years, and i have only replaced 1 CMOS battery ever. Which was for a 9 year old motherboard. So i am a bit skeptical.